First Lady

After the mutilated body of a woman is found addressed to Lt. Justin Savile V and Police Chief Cuddy R. Mangum, the two men must wade through politics, American aristocrats and back alleys to find the killer before he hunts again.

Malone, who created a stir a decade ago with some award-winning mystery-thrillers (Fast Love; Red Clay), returns after a long absence with this North Carolina-based thriller starring his likable previous protagonists, police chief Cuddy Mangum and his chief of homicide, Lt. Justin Savile V. They are up against a serial killer dubbed by the local press Guess Who, whose female victims are left looking like martyred saints; media attention steps up a notch when one of his victims may be world-famous Irish rock singer Mavis Mahar, in Hillston for a concert. There are myriad complications: Mavis may be having an affair with the governor of the state, whose wife Cuddy has long hankered after; a crooked attorney general promptly shows up at the scene of Mavis's apparent murder and destroys a heap of evidence. Meanwhile, the bodies including that of a woman judge in a prominent local murder case keep piling up, while Cuddy and Justin are running into dead ends in their search for suspects. Malone knows his turf, and his local politics are convincingly sketched in, with many welcome touches of humor. There are plenty of false moves, too, however: Justin's romance with Mavis is not convincing, and any perceptive reader will have spotted the killer long before the vaunted cops and their female FBI helpmeets do. There are also many beguiling byways of local lore, which Malone loves to lead us down, but which severely slow the narrative thrust. (Sept.)Forecast: Malone retains a loyal fan base and Sourcebooks will be pushing hard to make this a success by reaching them plus a vast new readership. Among the publisher's initiatives are a prepub author tour through the South, New England and the West Coast and a 12-city post-pub tour, as well as 30,0000 reading group guides and bookmarks. Expect high interest and healthy sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Devoted readers of Malone's two previous Cuddy Mangum-Justin Savile mysteries, as well as his mainstream fiction, including the superb Handling Sin (1986), have been waiting impatiently for 10 long years for a new novel from this masterful storyteller. Malone's hiatus from fiction writing, which, improbably, included an Emmy-winning stint as head writer for the soap One Life to Live, is finally over. His third mystery starring Mangum, the homespun Hillston, North Carolina, police chief, and Savile, his blueblood lieutenant, proves well worth the wait. Riding high from a wave of national press about his innovative crime fighting, Mangum seems ready for a fall. A serial killer appears to be on the loose in Hillston--body parts from one of his victims have been addressed to Cuddy and Justin--and the town politicos, jealous over Cuddy's newly acquired celebrity status, are conspiring to force his resignation. Meanwhile, Justin has his own problems. On the verge of a breakup with his wife, he falls into an affair with an Irish rock singer passing through on a concert tour. Additional murders draw both the singer and the First Lady of North Carolina, Cuddy's unrequited love, into the case, ratcheting up the personal stakes still higher. Malone has a lot on his plate here, plot-wise, and at times the plethora of ingredients seems a bit much for even a master chef to handle. Still, if the plot is overstuffed, the interplay between the characters is wonderfully rich, and the portrait of the New South vivifies the familiar facts of recent social history. A welcome return from a writer who has been sorely missed. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

With this very personal police procedural, rife with local color and memorable characters, Malone resurrects two North Carolina police detectives from Time's Witness (1989). Hillston, NC, chief of police Cuddy Mangum and Justin Savile, head of the department's homicide division, are men besieged. The trial of a local university professor accused of murdering his wife is making its way slowly through the judicial system, and the Hillston police are taking heat because of tampered evidence, sensational media coverage, and enraged public opinion. Meanwhile, an unidentified murder victim has puzzled Cuddy and Justin for far too long, and city officials are demanding a quick resolution or quicker resignations. Pending elections, a political sex scandal, bad behavior of a visiting rock star, and Cuddy and Justin's own personal devils add to the pressure. Then second and third deaths point to the likelihood of a serial murderer. If the murderer is too easily identified and some of the clues go unexplained, the reader will still relish this page-turner for the entertainment it provides. Recommended for public libraries. Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.